San Francisco paper puts visceral reaction on Page 1

As the long day wore on Tuesday and San Francisco Examiner Editor in Chief David Burgin contemplated what powerful approach his front page could possibly take the next morning, Burgin kept coming back to the emotion of the thing.

"I knew everybody was gonna do `Terror' and `Horror' and all that stuff," Burgin said Wednesday. "`Outrageous.' But I thought it had to have more vitriol, more bite to it, a little more fist shaking. I tried to imagine what they said at Pearl Harbor and `Those bastards' is what I kept thinking. I just took off the `Those."'

And so was born a newspaper front page that was the talk of the industry Wednesday and, according to Burgin, one received with passionate approval by his paper's readers.

"BASTARDS!" said the giant letters atop the front page of the 97,000-circulation Examiner, the city's No. 2 newspaper.

"It fit the rage," the editor said, although some in the newspaper business cautioned that such raw emotion undersells a good paper's content and can contribute to an unthinking desire for retribution.

The nation's newspapers presented widely varying tones on their front pages, in contrast to a generally more homogenous presentation by television news.

As for the Examiner's epithet, Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla., said: "At least it's original. But as you move from `terror' to `attack' you make a very, very important step. To `bastards' is one step further. You move powerfully into the rhetoric of war."

It may be appropriate given the way political leaders are talking, Clark said, but there is "collateral damage," specifically the potential for demonization of not only the enemy but of "people who look and dress like the enemy, like those `bastards.'"

TV coverage restrained

As the media tried to cope with what was widely labeled "The Day After," presentations on television Tuesday and Wednesday--almost everyone's first information source in an event of this magnitude--were similar and largely and appropriately dispassionate.

Some notes of bloodlust threatened to creep into Wednesday morning's television coverage, especially on cable, but as the day went on and the story developed the news providers returned to their measured tones.

On the Internet, "there was too much traffic. They just got bombarded," said spokeswoman Maria Bunatag at Nielson's NetRatings, which tracks Web usage, although many sites appeared to have recovered by Wednesday. The Boston Globe's Web site, for example, reported 6.5 million page views Tuesday, more than twice its previous high of 3 million.

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times -- which estimated that it had received more than 11 million page views Tuesday -- continued Wednesday to allow registered and unregistered readers alike to access coverage on their Web sites.

In the nation's newspapers Wednesday morning, readers could find more personality than in the television or Web coverage, a reflection of papers' traditional role as records not only of the moment, but historical markers destined to be keepsakes. Scores of papers published extra editions Tuesday, with the Tribune taking the apparently unprecedented step of delivering a special, evening edition to the homes of its weekday subscribers and reaching an estimated 80 percent of them. The Boston Globe, leading paper in a city from which two of the hijacked planes took off, was one of the few to put out an afternoon special edition Wednesday.

For their Wednesday editions, papers nationwide printed extra copies. The Tribune added 15 percent to its press run, and The New York Times printed 450,000 copies on top of its circulation of roughly 1.2 million and was selling out, according to a spokeswoman; for Thursday, the nationally distributed paper planned to add 900,000 copies to its press run.

The Wednesday front pages reflected editors' attempts to capture the events' complicated mixture of news and emotion and sum up a historic day.

The front page

Results ranged from Burgin's "fist shaking" to, as he predicted, a wide variety of "terror" formulations to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's stark question, "How Many Dead?"

"Up until about two hours before press time we were leaning toward `Changed Forever,'" Democrat-Gazette Managing Editor David Bailey said.

In the end, though, "We were asking ourselves, `What is the crucial point here,'" he said. "And we thought, `My God, we don't even know how many dead.' We can't even get an estimate."

Also popular were Pearl Harbor references: "INFAMY" in the Washington Times, "A new day of infamy" in suburban Chicago's Daily Herald.

Under a banner headline that read "U.S. ATTACKED," The New York Times went to an extra-large typeface for the body of its lead story on Tuesday's terrorist attacks, a striking front-page presentation used only twice previously in the paper: when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and when President Richard Nixon resigned.

In Chicago, the Sun-Times went with "OUTRAGE," while the Tribune opted for a quote from President Bush: "Our nation saw evil."

"By Wednesday morning we weren't announcing this news to the world. That's not the way it works anymore," said Tribune Editor Ann Marie Lipinski. "We were trying to convey a sense of how the news was impacting the nation. Bush speaking that evening was a big part of the story and using his words from that speech seemed to tie those elements together.

"The point was to not be incendiary--which I think a few of the headlines I saw were--to be careful about being jingoistic, and first and foremost to be careful about what we knew."